Takeover (9 page)

In 1975 I spent several days with about thirty others at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; one of the other people there was one of Washington’s most respected and insightful political observers, columnist David Broder. Broder was still at the old
Washington Star
, and at an afternoon session of the group, he mentioned that his colleague at the
Star
, John Filka, had written an article that day featuring me and discussing the rise of a new group within the conservative movement he termed the “New Right.”

We of what John Filka called the “New Right” believed that having a plan and coordinating our efforts on the conservative agenda was the only way to achieve success. We soon formalized a breakfast meeting every Wednesday from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. To the extent that Hillary Clinton’s vast right-wing conspiracy ever existed, it met at Elaine’s and my home in McLean from 1975 until 1984.

The regulars at the breakfast included Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute, Ron Godwin of the Moral Majority, and Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus. We also made it a point to invite any conservative leaders who might be visiting Washington from around the country.

In order to grow the conservative movement, and build the connections between conservatives then scattered across the country (and isolated in a way that is hard to appreciate in our present Internet-connected age), we also opened our home to receptions, meetings, and fund-raisers, and made it the unofficial gathering spot for conservatives in the Washington, DC, area and for conservatives from around the country when they visited Washington, DC.

Those of us on the outside of government later realized we needed to add an inside-the-government element to our meetings if we were to more effectively advance our cause.

Conservatives who were then backbenchers in Congress, such as Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Hal Dobbs, Bob Walker, Bill Dannemeyer,
and others, began joining us for an evening dinner meeting.

The evening meeting included the same group as our breakfast meeting, plus members of Congress. But these evening dinner meetings weren’t the usual Washington “grip and grin” receptions or wonky policy seminars. Everyone was expected to contribute practical ideas and take action to advance our goals. Everyone left with assignments and follow-ups and made a commitment to report back to the group—and it worked.

In March 1977, President Carter announced that he wanted to make four changes to the election laws. He wanted to abolish the Electoral College, mandate Election Day voter registration, abolish the Hatch Act, and have federal funding of congressional elections—any of this sound familiar?

A few days later, about 10:15 one evening, Paul Weyrich called me and said he had just come from a meeting of Republican members of Congress, who agreed it was bad for the Republican Party, and the country; but it would be difficult if not impossible to stop it.

I said, “Paul, I don’t agree. I think we can develop a plan to sidetrack Carter’s proposed changes in elections laws, but it is late. Now, let me get back to sleep, and I’ll call you in the morning.”

I called Paul back, and we began to meet regularly once or twice a week to develop a strategy and plan to defeat Carter’s proposed election law changes that would put the Republicans out of business and make sure Democrats had a lock on elections going forward.

In an early meeting, Dick Dingman from Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation told us that he had a copy of a San Francisco underground newspaper that was carrying an advertisement for a firm that, for five dollars, would send you an official-looking ID—no questions asked.

Congressmen Steve Symms and Robert Dornan got national coverage in July 1977 with dummy ID cards obtained to demonstrate the possibilities for fraud in Carter’s instant voter registration plan. The ID cards each had the photo of either Symms or Dornan, but the names of liberal Democrats on the House Administration
Committee who supported Carter’s plan.

The reporters and photographers loved it, particularly when liberal committee chairman Frank Thompson blew his top in public over the IDs. The
Washington Star
published an enormous five-column photo of the phony IDs on page one, which had been blown up to poster size for a news conference, and the Carter plan died that day. That September a group of conservatives hosted a dinner recognizing Senator Laxalt and me for helping to lead the effort to defeat Carter’s plan, with me representing our coalition on the outside and Laxalt representing the inside of our coalition.

The advice I gave to my conservative colleagues then is something conservatives should continue to take to heart today, and that is that we can’t kick all barking dogs.

The first battles it was necessary to fight were those battles that would grow the movement; school prayer, for example, may not be the most important issue, but it would grow the movement. The Panama Canal giveaway would grow the movement.

There were also those issues that weren’t as exciting to a lot of people, but would make it more difficult to elect conservatives and might even put us out of business. Clearly, Carter’s plan had the potential to put conservatives out of business, so we had to develop a strategy to defeat Carter’s ideas.

As Carter’s effort to return the Panama Canal to Panama moved forward, the Republican National Committee was mailing out millions of letters signed by Ronald Reagan asking people to contribute to the RNC in an effort to defeat the Panama Canal treaties. Approximately $700,000 was raised.

But when Paul Laxalt asked RNC chairman Bill Brock for $50,000 to help underwrite the cost of a “Truth Squad” media tour, the RNC chairman refused. The outrageous fact is that Brock refused to spend any of the money raised by Reagan’s anti-treaty letter on any anti-treaty activities.

At their insistence, Laxalt and Reagan talked with Brock on December 15, 1977, via a joint telephone call—and came away
very angry. Someone present during this conversation said he heard Reagan use words that he didn’t know Reagan knew.

But Brock would not budge.

Of course, many suspected that Brock’s refusal had something to do with the fact that he was from Tennessee, and establishment Republican Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee was prepared to go along with Carter and ratify the treaty giving away control of the canal.

I was asked to raise the $50,000 Laxalt and Reagan needed to help fund the “Truth Squad,” but instead of raising $50,000, The Viguerie Company, on a pro bono basis, raised over $110,000—one more demonstration of the reduced importance of political parties and proof of the New Right’s ability to engage in and finance important political activity outside of the Republican Party.

Naturally, critics will argue that we
lost
the Panama Canal Treaty fight.

My answer to that was (and it applies to the Tea Party movement today), what made the New Right different from the Old Right was not ideology; what distinguished the New Right from the Old Right was that we were operationally different.

The Old Right had become defeatist; they were used to showing up and getting beat two to one and then retiring from the fight until the next vote.

However, in the same situation, those in the New Right would cinch up their belts, organize, call meetings, develop plans, and send out a couple million letters explaining why the way to win the next battle was to defeat those who voted wrong—be they Democrats or Republicans—and keep pushing forward toward our goal of having conservatives govern America.

That was really the defining difference between Old Right and New Right—we weren’t afraid to try, even if there was only a small to no chance of success. We were interested in building a movement and getting grassroots conservatives engaged in that movement. In the waging of the Panama Canal Treaty battle, over one hundred
thousand people got involved as activists or donors, and thousands had the opportunity to develop leadership skills.

In 1977 and 1978 Howard Phillips visited every congressional district in America. During a trip to New Hampshire in 1977, only five people showed up for a meeting. One of them was an Allegheny Airlines copilot named Gordon Humphrey, who volunteered to run against Democrat Thomas J. McIntyre. Gordon Humphrey became one of three New Right senators elected in 1978.

In 1977 my wife and I had spent a month in Taiwan as guests of the Eisenhower Chinese Fellowship Program at the recommendation of Lee Edwards. Through that trip I had established relationships with a number of government, business, and political leaders, so in December 1978, when Carter announced the new “relationship” with Taiwan, which was weaker and less formal than what Nixon and Kissinger had agreed to, I organized a trip for about thirty conservative leaders to go to Taiwan.

Newly elected New Hampshire senator Gordon Humphrey was one of those leaders;

We of the New Right understood the lesson of Babe Ruth’s 1927 season. That year the Bambino led the major leagues with sixty home runs, but he also led in strikeouts with eighty-nine.

We weren’t worried about how the establishment, the press, and others would view us if we lost. We knew if you expected to hit a lot of home runs, you had to expect to strike out a lot.

One would think that the Republican “leadership” on Capitol Hill and at the Republican National Committee would have understood this and exercised the leadership necessary to rally opposition to Carter’s Big Government liberal agenda, but they didn’t.

Politically, in 1975 things were looking very dark for Republicans, and it seemed to those attending my Wednesday breakfasts that it was like being on an airplane, that was bouncing around in the sky. Figuratively, those who attended the breakfasts were in the back of the airplane, and we thought we had some better ideas about how to fly the plane.

We didn’t want to be the pilots and fly the plane; we just wanted
to offer some advice. So we walked up to the front of the plane, which represented the Republican Party, and knocked on the cockpit door (you could do that in those days). No one answered, so we opened the door, and lo and behold, we found no one flying the Republican plane! So we all sat down at the controls, and for five or six years we were the main leaders of the opposition to the Democrats and President Carter. Most of the national media, as well as the country’s political pros, also saw the New Right, not the Republican National Committee, as the main opposition to the Democrats.

One afternoon in 1979, influential Washington journalist David Broder came to my office and said he was very perplexed about the lack of progress on the Democratic agenda, given that Democrats had strong majorities in the House and Senate. He had been to Vice President Walter Mondale’s office and he had been to the White House and other places, and no one could explain why with the Democrats’ overwhelming majorities on Capitol Hill, Carter’s agenda was not moving. Election law changes, consumer protection agency, and other items—it was all in paralysis; nothing was happening.

I told him, “I don’t know if I can be of help, but let me tell you what we’re doing at The Viguerie Company.” We were mailing one hundred million letters a year, urging grassroots conservatives to speak out, write, and call their members of Congress to oppose President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats on all of the important items on Carter’s agenda. What we were doing was also being done by other conservatives. This was an early example of the successful use of the new and alternative medium of direct mail to engage people politically.

Carter and the Democrats were stymied because the New Right was coordinating the opposition to their liberal policies; we were meeting multiple times a week to plan strategy, rallying millions of grassroots conservatives to our cause through direct mail, and all of this was happening under the political establishment’s radar.

It was by now apparent to most observers that the most effective opposition to Carter’s policies was coming out of the New Right,
not the Republican National Committee.

What establishment Republicans had not grasped was that all through the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, every time they abandoned conservative principles, a group of conservative thinkers and grassroots activists would meet and organize to oppose their progressive policies; be they giving away the Panama Canal, destructive energy and economic policies (which cost America millions of jobs by accelerating the contraction of the domestic auto and oil industries), creating the Legal Services Corporation, asking Congress for a tariff on imported oil, raising taxes to “Whip Inflation Now,” the ABM Treaty, the first SALT Treaty, abandoning Taiwan, or the loss of US nuclear superiority to the Soviets.
²

We had learned that the only time you are guaranteed to lose is when you fail to fight. Conservatives need more of that same kind of outside, bottom-up leadership today to replace the establishment and take over the Republican Party and make it the effective conservative opposition to progressive policies. Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, and their supporters in the Tea Party movement, understand this—that’s why they undertook their October 2013 fight to defund Obamacare, for example.

The New Right organizations used the alternative media of direct mail to identify and motivate millions of grassroots conservatives who opposed policies that they thought showed a lack of American political resolve, and a weakness that endangered not just America, but the entire free world.

The millions of Americans who supported these groups financially, signed their petitions, and wrote letters to the editor and to Congress, and called and visited members of Congress, thought that most of the choices the Democratic and Republican establishments were making with respect to the Soviet Union were the wrong choices, and so did Ronald Reagan.

This was one of the secrets of Reagan’s ability to peel off ethnic blue-collar Democrats from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party. They understood—because they or their parents
had fled Communism—exactly where weakness in the face of Communism led, and they also grasped better than native-born liberals that a strong and free America really was “the last best hope of man on earth,” as Reagan so eloquently put it.